Start James Joyce with Dubliners, Not Ulysses

Many readers come to James Joyce because of Ulysses, and many stop there, a few pages in, convinced that Joyce is not for them. The reputation of one book hides the fact that Joyce wrote a collection of short, plain, carefully observed stories that need no special preparation at all.

This guide proposes a simple order: a handful of stories from Dubliners, then the rest of the collection, then A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and only after that a decision about Ulysses. It describes openings, structure, and what to notice. It does not give away how any story or chapter ends.

Begin inside Dubliners with “Araby” and “Eveline”

Dubliners contains fifteen stories.¹ They are arranged roughly by the age of the people at their center, moving from childhood toward adult and public life, and the first three are told in the first person by a boy. You can read them in order, but two stories from the early part of the book make an especially clear first contact.

“Araby” is the third story. It opens on North Richmond Street, described as “blind,” with a dead priest’s house and a boy who watches a neighbor’s door from his front parlor. The story is short, the events are small, and everything depends on the gap between what the boy feels and what the adults around him are doing. Read it in one sitting and then look back at how much of the story is waiting.

“Eveline” follows immediately. A young woman sits at a window at evening, smelling dusty cretonne, watching a few people pass on the avenue. Over a few pages she weighs a decision about her home, her father, and a man who has offered her another life. Almost nothing happens in the present moment; the story is made of what she remembers and what she expects. The two stories together show the collection’s method: an ordinary person, a single pressure point, and a prose that refuses to explain more than the character could.

Read the middle stories, and keep “The Dead” for last

After those two, go back to the beginning and read “The Sisters” and “An Encounter,” then continue in order. Stories such as “Two Gallants,” “A Little Cloud,” “Counterparts,” and “A Painful Case” shift the attention to grown men and their money, their drinking, and their small humiliations. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is the one most dependent on Irish political background; it is fine to read it for its talk and its room without identifying every name.

“The Dead” is the last and by far the longest story, and it rewards being read last. It opens at a party given by two elderly sisters, with Lily the caretaker’s daughter “literally run off her feet” answering the door. The first half is a crowded social evening, full of dances, speeches, and food. The second half narrows to two people. Reading it after the other fourteen lets you hear how the whole collection’s themes return in a longer form. If you read it first, the shorter stories can feel like fragments of it rather than complete things in themselves.

Then A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has five chapters, each substantially longer than any Dubliners story.² It follows Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to the end of his university years, and the prose changes as he does. The first pages are written in the rhythm of a small child’s thought, with a story about a moocow and a song. Later chapters move through a boarding school, a family in declining circumstances, a long religious retreat, and arguments about art and belief.

This is the book where Joyce’s technique begins to ask something of the reader. There are no chapter titles, scenes change without transitions, and conversations are reported without explanation of who the speakers are to one another. Two habits help. First, treat each chapter as a unit and read its opening pages slowly until you have located Stephen’s age and situation. Second, accept that the style is matching his mind at that age, so a passage that feels overwrought is often meant to.

Chapter III contains an extended sermon on hell that some readers find the hardest stretch. It is long on purpose. If you need to, read it in two sessions, but do not skip it, because Chapter IV depends on what it does to Stephen.

Why Ulysses is not the first book

Ulysses is roughly three times the length of A Portrait, and the Gutenberg text, taken from the 1922 Shakespeare and Company edition, is divided into three parts and eighteen unnumbered episodes.³ The first three episodes return to Stephen Dedalus, so a reader who knows A Portrait already has a foothold that a newcomer does not. From the fourth episode onward the book changes manner almost every chapter: newspaper headlines, a catechism of questions and answers, a long passage without punctuation, parodies of older English prose.

None of this is a reason never to read it. It is a reason not to read it first. A reader who has finished Dubliners knows how Joyce builds a scene out of unexplained detail, and a reader who has finished A Portrait knows Stephen, the Dedalus family, and the way the prose takes the color of a character’s thought. Those two books are not preparation in the sense of homework; they are the same writer at a scale where you can see what he is doing. If you then open Ulysses and find the first episode readable, that is the moment to continue. If you open it cold and give up, you may never find out that “Araby” was waiting the whole time.

What to expect in these books

Dubliners includes alcoholism, domestic violence against a child in “Counterparts,” the death of a priest, and, in “A Painful Case,” a death reported in a way that suggests suicide. Several stories depend on casual period attitudes toward women, servants, and religion that are presented without comment. A Portrait contains corporal punishment at school, a prolonged and frightening description of damnation, and frank treatment of adolescent sexuality and prostitution. The Irish Catholic setting is central to both books, and characters express anti-English and anti-Protestant sentiments of their time.

How to read them

All three texts are on Project Gutenberg as free EPUB downloads. Save the EPUB, upload it to BlueReader, and wait for server processing; the book then appears on your bookshelf and your position syncs across devices.⁴ Dubliners works well as a story-a-day book for two weeks, and a reader with a browser tab open on the train can finish “Araby” before the next stop.

For a different approach to short classics, the stories collected in classic short stories for beginners are mostly plainer than Joyce and make a good warm-up. If what interests you in A Portrait is prose that follows a mind’s movement, Joyce’s contemporary is introduced in Virginia Woolf’s early novels, which take a comparable step from conventional narration toward interior writing.